CHAPTER 4 | GETTING STARTED: SETTING UP THE TIME, SPACE, AND TOOLSmenting a personal management system, and for most of the execu-
tives I have personally coached, it represents one of the biggest
opportunities for improvement. Many times I have driven to the
local office-supply store with a client and bought a filing cabinet,
a big stock of file folders, and a labeler, just so we could create an
appropriate place in which to put two-thirds of the "stuff" lying
around his/her desk and credenza and even on the office floors.
We're concerned here mostly with general-reference filing—
as distinct from discrete filing systems devoted to contracts, finan-
cial information, or other categories of data that deserve their
own place and indexing. General-reference files should hold arti-
cles, brochures, pieces of paper, notes, printouts, faxes—basically
anything that you want to keep for its interesting or useful data
and that doesn't fit into your specialized filing systems and won't
stand up by itself on a shelf (as will large software manuals and
seminar binders).
If you have a trusted secretary or assistant who maintains
that system for you, so you can put a "File as X" Post-it on the
document and send it "out" to him or her, great. But ask yourself if
you still have some personally interesting or confidential support
material that should be accessible at any moment, even when your
assistant isn't around. If so, you'll still need your own system,
either in your desk or right beside it somewhere.Success Factors for Filing
I strongly suggest that you maintain your own personal, at-hand
filing system. It should take you less than one minute to pick
something up out of your in-basket or print it from e-mail, decide
it needs no action but has some potential future value, and finish
storing it in a trusted system. If it takes you longer than a minute
to complete that sequence of actions, you have a significant
improvement opportunity, since you probably won't file the docu-
ment; you'll stack it or stuff it instead. Besides being fast, the sys-
tem needs to be fun and easy, current and complete. Otherwise
you'll unconsciously resist emptying your in-basket because you